Challenges of working for the Tuberculosis Association

Simkins discusses the challenges she faced while working for the Tuberculosis Association throughout the 1930s. Simkins had been hired to help educate teachers about health-related issues, namely the threat of tuberculosis. Simkins addresses racial tensions within the Tuberculosis Association while she worked for them and argues that her supervisor disapproved of her association with the NAACP. Simkins explains why she finally left the Tuberculosis Association in 1942, when she was increasingly criticized for trying to weave information about matters such as venereal disease into her program. Her comments here reveal the kinds of social justice issues with which Simkins was increasingly concerned and she alludes to a general failure of paternalistic organizations to address real problems.

Citing this Excerpt

Oral History Interview with Modjeska Simkins, July 28, 1976. Interview G-0056-2. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Full Text of the Excerpt

JACQUELYN HALL:

And they had what, a colored division?

MODJESKA SIMKINS:

Yes, they had what they called a Negro program.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Were there any blacks on the board?

MODJESKA SIMKINS:

No, not on the board. This Negro group was kind of an advisory group. For
instance, when they had the annual meetings, they'd hardly have a Negro
there. If they did, they'd put him a way over in the corner somewhere. I
never would bother with going to them because I didn't let anybody sit
me in a corner. I'd just sit in my own corner in my house. But after I
worked my program up quite a while, I had so many volunteers, scores and
scores of them, that on several occasions I called my workers together
and I'd always have a reception for them here during the State Teachers
Association. Many of them were teachers. That irritated me, I mean just
angered me because they were always telling me that tuberculosis is the
greatest threat to blacks, and yet when they'd have these state meetings
and they'd bring these authorities in on tuberculosis, case-finding and
all that type of thing, the Negroes weren't there. They had them, and
then they would kind of do like a pigeon: eat something and regurgitate
it to the little pigeons. Well, that's the kind of thing that was.
I really had to tell my boss off one day when she was trying to make some
kind of excuse about these separate things. You know, I knew why they
were separate 'cause I knew what these segregation things were in these
hotels and things. I said, "Well, one thing is boiled down to
this. You all are concerned more about eating an old cold piece of
chicken and a few little ol' green peas sitting up in the top of a pile
of potatoes than you are about actually fighting tuberculosis."
Oh, all that stuff just got on my nerves. Every now and then I'd have to
boil it over.

JACQUELYN HALL:

Who was your boss?

MODJESKA SIMKINS:

A woman named Chauncey MacDonald—C-H-A-U-N-C-E-Y Blackburn.
She came from a family of Blackburns, Chauncey Blackburn MacDonald. A
highly religious family. I didn't say Christian; I said religious.

JACQUELYN HALL:

How did she respond to your …

MODJESKA SIMKINS:

Oh, she thought it was awful that I would think like that. She thought
quite often that I was an awful creature.

JACQUELYN HALL:

What other conflicts did you have?

MODJESKA SIMKINS:

Well, I had several … one that I think of. Well, there were
two other outstanding. One was that she did not want me to work with
NAACP, didn't want to hear about me being connected with NAACP in any
way. And she called me in one day … which, I wasn't taking
any time from my job working with NAACP. But she didn't want to hear of
me bothering … at that time, the ferment had started in the
state. The NAACP conference was organized in 1940, state conference. She
heard about that, and the man who was president was a firebrand in a
way. And she—I think some of the Negroes on that board had
something to do with it—but she said that she thought that I
ought to let somebody else take on the fight like that, and I tend to
what I was doing. I said, "Well, I'm not doing it on the
time." I said, "I can belong to NAACP, and it doesn't
affect my work. You ask me, you say, you want production. Am I bringing
production?" She said, "Yes." I said,
"Well, what's the gripe?" Well, she just thought that
I ought not be in it. This man Hinton was an awful man and I shouldn't
be connected, and she would prefer that I shouldn't. I said,
"Well, if that's the way you feel about
it, I'll tell you how I feel about it. I'd rather all Negroes die and go
to hell with tuberculosis than go through some of the things they're
suffering right now, and that the NAACP is trying to stop
them." She said, "Ooh, ooh, ooh." Why, she
just come near having ten kittens, you know!
[laughter]
That was one. And then around in that time, they made a picture down in
Tuskegee about … some picture to help fight tuberculosis
called "Let My People Live." And they premiered that
picture in Camden. I mean, so far as South Carolina was concerned, they
premiered it in Camden. I don't know where I saw it. I guess I saw it
… I don't know where I saw it, but I saw it before she saw
it. And some old woman in Camden saw it before she saw it. So she told
me that Miss So-and-So in Camden said that they said that they were
making "Let My People Live" as a picture by Negroes to
help fight tuberculosis among Negroes. But it looks like they had more
fair Negroes in it than they had actual showing of black Negroes. I
said, "I saw ‘Let My People
Live’." I said, "That old woman doesn't
know what she's talking about." I said, "She either
didn't see the picture or she didn't try to see it through because she
got too shook up before she saw all of it." I said,
"The preacher they got in there's as black as any ink I ever
saw." I said, "And they've got the choir of Tuskegee
in it, and I know there's no white people on that. And if there's any
yellow ones on that, they didn't make themselves yellow."
[END OF TAPE 1, SIDE B]
[TAPE 2, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 2, SIDE A]

JACQUELYN HALL:

I was just going to ask you why you quit working for the Association in
1942, for the Tuberculosis Association. Isn't that right?

MODJESKA SIMKINS:

Yes. I quit working for them because the conditions became untenable,
because of certain of these, you know, restrictions that were there
because of the NAACP. My boss told me that he thought I would have to
resign. I told her that I was not going to resign, that she would have
to fire me because I hadn't done anything to resign for, and my work
(according to what she said to me) had been productive and satisfactory
and that I had no reason to resign, and she could just fire me, which
she did not want to do. She told me I built up my program on
personality, and what she meant by that was that
I had made myself so close to the people that maybe it could create a
problem. I said, "I think anybody that builds a public
relations program builds it on personality." I said,
"Jesus Christ built his on personality, so I don't see why you
should fault me for that." So as I said yesterday, there were
people in that black committee, in that Negro program that she had, that
were easily influenced and handled by her. And when push came to shove,
why, my opinion is that they decided in the meeting that since
… Well, see, some of them didn't like the thrust that NAACP
was making at that time, right at the beginning of the forties, into the
political action field trying to get the ballot. So some of them (one or
two of them) on that board were as reactionary as she was, even though
they were black and she was white (reactionary, I mean, to the program
that was evolving at that time towards the civil rights movement).
Nobody could foresee at that time that the civil rights movement would
gather the momentum that it did in the next ten to fifteen years. But
the strength of it at that time was so far removed from what it had been
that the Negroes were going to make it very definite that they were out
for the federal courts and the ballot. And of course, with what I told
you yesterday, I didn't see any need of keeping people from having
tuberculosis and then letting them suffer other things that might be
worse even than slavery. So then they just decided. And I don't know how
that was done, except that I do know that my services were no longer
acceptable. I had gone into the program in 1932 with the state being
divided into two what they called organized and unorganized sections. I
had at that time, as I remember, about thirteen counties that were in
the very poorly developed sections of the state, and they were called
unorganized. And I had charge of the beginning
of the Christmas Seal program in that area, which when I went into it
they gave me a report that was around eighteen hundred dollars for the
sale in that area (meaning seal sales among Negroes in 1932, as I
remember. Those records are at my house.) Then in 1942 when I left I had
worked until I had carried the income from the Negro Seal sale to
$42,000, see. And then I had organized, helped to organize,
clinics. I'd worked with the Health Department. Another difference we
had was, as I told you she had her qualms about venereal diseases: the
old-time idea that the way you get venereal disease is a sin. She always
connected it with illicit sexual activity. And she did not want me to
talk about venereal diseases at all in my program; and I aimed my
program toward maternal and infant mortality, and venereal
diseases—and tuberculosis—three of the four
things. But anyway, she did not want me to enter into
any work in connection with venereal
diseases—that is, in my public health education program. So I
refused to conform there, because I knew that the venereal diseases were
a problem. And since at that time we didn't have anything but 606 (and
it was a long-time treatment) we had to work even harder in preventive
programs than you have to today when you have a kind of quick cure, you
know. So that was another one of the kind of endemic frictions, her
feeling about anybody who had venereal disease not worth bothering
with—they'd been sinning, you know.